J: Mini-foods seem to be kind of a thing in foodie circles these days. I suppose I can see why (the internet loves cute things, and the smaller a food is, the fewer calories it has, so… you can eat more of it, right? No?), and sliders are a pretty classic miniature version of a pretty classic food. I’ve often seen them served with brie, and we have a goal eventually of making sliders with Kobe or Wagyu beef and brie, but that was a bit…indulgent for the budgets of a grad student and a freelancer. So we settled on regular (but good quality!) beef and some muenster cheese, instead of cheddar, to put a little spin of our own on these sliders.

J: Continuing (slowly) along our culinary voyage around the world, we next hit Algeria. As has been the case with many of these countries, I really had very little idea of what Algerian food looked like, or what a “classic” Algerian dish might consist of. This stew-type meal turned out to be quite delicious and comfort-food-y — I suspect it would make a great warming meal on a cold winter night. The original recipe included chicken, but as we are trying to be a little more vegetarian (accepting that we won’t be able to get around meat in many of these international dishes), we substituted potatoes for the chicken, and it still turned out really well.

J: So, we have been terribly negligent all summer. You’d think that summer would be a good time for regular posting — but we’ve moved, done some much-needed traveling/”vacationing” (but not really), and otherwise been pretty occupied with grad school and work, so unfortunately the blog has kind of fallen by the wayside. While we struggle to get a real post up (our next country will be up soon!), this post is just some shameless laziness on our part to remind everyone, including ourselves, that we still exist. Take one of our favorite things (pizza), add another one of our favorite things (pasta), and voila, you have a post with two images. Need some more instruction on how to make pizza (because no, you are not getting off the hook with storebought dough)? Try one of our other pizza posts (here, here, here!).

J: Welcome to the second installation in our round-the-world cooking trip. This offering is a national dish of Albania (Tirana is the Albanian capital! *the more you know*), and is usually made with veal or beef liver. However, for the sake of our wallets, we opted not to use those meats. Lamb is another common meat used in Albanian cuisine, and since neither of us had cooked or eaten lamb before, we decided we’d take the opportunity to try something new, so we substituted that instead.

J: Recently, one of my friends told us about United Noshes, an awesome project some people are undertaking to cook a meal from every member nation of the UN, in alphabetical order (thanks Colleen!). We decided that it sounded like a terrific idea. It’s always hard to try and come up with new exciting dishes that aren’t just variations on stuff we already make, so having 193 essentially pre-planned things to cook is awesome. We are starting off here with Afghanistan, and I will say right off the bat that this yogurt-nut curry is getting added to our regular rotation. It was absurdly delicious.

E: While Joanna was away at a conference, I was at home and looking for something relatively simple but new that lay somewhere along the Mexican-spectrum of food. I found these while perusing the Joy of Cooking a long time ago, but they then slipped my mind for quite some time. As is usual of recipes from Joy, when I finally got around to making them, I found out that these enchiladas rock!

I skimped a bit on the amount of cheese I melted on top of them, which was probably their only failing. The filling was delicious, even for someone who doesn’t like sour cream. And the tomatillo sauce is really excellent, and definitely something I plan to make again and use for my own nefarious . . um . . recipes.

J: I’ll come out and admit it up front: these muffins are kind of cheating. They are actually the same basic recipe as these muffins, just with a few minor tweaks — why mess with a good thing, right? Anyway, the coffee cake muffins were kind of delicious, in case you don’t remember or are just joining us now on our culinary journey (welcome!). But we wanted something different and had some interesting ingredients lying around, so … this variation was born! And who could complain?